TA-65 and telomerase activation goes mainstream via Suzanne Somers

Over a decade ago, a marketer I respected told me, do not be first to a category. The market will forget you. The pattern he was describing is the one where you put serious work into something new, the audience does not understand it yet, and someone with a bigger platform shows up later and reaps most of the credit.

I have lived through that pattern with fish oil, with raspberry ketone, with elderberry extract, with rhodiola, with cordyceps, with hawthorn berry, with curcumin, and now with TA-65. The upside, for those of us who got onto these compounds early, is that we got several years of benefit before the price went up and the market got crowded. The downside is that the marketing world tends to credit whoever has the largest broadcast platform at the moment the topic goes mainstream.

What is happening with TA-65 right now

Suzanne Somers’ newer book includes a section on telomeres, telomerase, and TA-65. I have no formal relationship with her publishing team. She is not getting her TA-65 from me. The book compresses about thirty years of telomere science into a short section, but it gets the broad strokes right, including the names of the Nobel laureates whose work established telomerase as a real and important enzyme.

For the field, this is a net positive. Suzanne reaches a large audience, particularly women over fifty, who would not have encountered telomere science any other way. When she says it, more people pay attention than when I say it. That is not a complaint. It is how mass media works.

One specific upside

Suzanne has been public about her breast cancer history. Her continued use of TA-65 is, in its own way, a real-world data point in the long-running question about telomerase activation and cancer risk. I have written about this question more times than I can count. The short version is that the cancer concern was raised on theoretical grounds early on, when telomerase activation was first proposed as an anti-aging intervention, and the long-term human data has not borne it out at the doses used in TA-65.

That conversation will continue. The data so far has been reassuring.

Where the field is now

An anti-aging conference is happening in Orlando this week. Several of the people who built the telomere field are presenting. Greta Blackburn, my co-author. Mike Fossel, who predicted clinical telomerase use back in the 1990s. Jerry Shay, one of the original researchers in telomere biology. Steve Matlin from Life Length, which runs commercial telomere testing using Maria Blasco’s high-throughput Q-FISH method. An entire morning of the program is dedicated to telomere and telomerase science. The audience is approximately a thousand practicing physicians.

Two years ago, I gave the only telomere talk at a similar conference, and the room held maybe two hundred people. The shift in attention, in two years, has been significant.

The takeaway for readers

If you have been on TA-65 since 2009 or 2010, you already know the answer. If you have not, the question is no longer whether telomere maintenance matters. It is whether the price of TA-65 fits your budget and how much of the cellular-aging case you want to address pharmacologically.

For those for whom the price is reasonable, TA-65 remains the only commercially available compound with rigorous human data on the relevant endpoints, reduction of critically short telomeres, immune profile changes, inflammatory markers, and a number of other age-related biomarkers.

For those for whom the price is not reasonable, the Telomere Edge Packs, my omega-3 supplement at a clinically dosed level, vitamin D adequacy, and the lifestyle inputs I have written about for years remain the right place to start.

The field has moved. Welcome to whoever just arrived.

— Doc